Objectivity

Abstract

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison bring welcome lucidity to the often confused terminology surrounding objectivity in this ambitious history of the concept. The authors see objectivity firmly established as an epistemic shift only in the late nineteenth century, in the wake of technological innovations such as photography and kemography. At the time, the authors argue, venerated concepts of ideal forms and processes such as those suggested by Plato and Aristotle were gradually discarded. Their vivid example is of the British physicist Arthur Worthington, struggling to capture the morphology of liquid drops striking a flat, horizontal surface from above. Worthington's initial publications, based on his own observations, displayed illustrations of perfectly symmetrical “splashes,” convinced as he was of nature's underlying regularity. Later, aided by a camera with a millisecond flash, Worthington found that the helter-skelter impacts he had earlier dismissed as peculiarities were in fact the rule. No ideal, rounded cascades akin to his earlier, drawn examples would appear. Eventually Worthington came to embrace what he called “an objective view,” furnished by putatively impartial new technologies and thus presenting “real, as opposed to imaginary fluids” (16).